Fun Facts About Our Onomasticon

The Book of Mormon contains 337 proper names and 21 gentilics (or analogous forms) based on proper names. Included in this count are names that normally would not be called proper, such as non-English names of plants, animals, etc., if they appear as transliterations in the English text and not as translations. In addition, two proper names that appear only in translation, BOUNTIFUL and DESOLATION, which are included in the Name Index, are not included in this count. The Onomasticon includes all proper nouns. Of these 337 proper names, 188 are unique to the Book of Mormon, while 149 are common to the Book of Mormon and the Bible. If the textual passages common to the Book of Mormon and the Bible are excluded, 53 names occur in both books.

Apart from King James English spellings of biblical names in the Book of Mormon, the letters F, Q, V, W, X, and Y do not appear in transliterated Book of Mormon nouns. The one exception is the /FF/ in ZENIFF and ZIFF. This exception could be explained by an aspirated final /p/.

F only appears singly in one such noun which is familiar from the KJV (LUCIFER).

V only appears inside such nouns which are familiar from the KJV (EVE, LEVI).

W only appears inside one such noun which is familiar from the KJV (JEW, JEWS).

Y only appears inside such nouns which are familiar from the KJV (MARY, SYRIA, TIMOTHY).

Q and X do not appear at all.

The Lehite-Mulekite names often show greatest affinity with Semitic languages (Nibley, CWHN 6:281-94). For instance, Abish and Abinadi resemble ab "father" names in Hebrew; Alma appears in a Bar Kokhba letter (c. A.D. 130) found in the Judean desert; Mulek could be a diminutive of West Semitic mlk "king"; Omni and Limhi appear to have the same morphology as Old Testament Omri and Zimri; Jershon is remarkably close to a noun form of the Hebrew root yrš (see JERSHON in Name Index). Some Lehite-Mulekite names resemble Egyptian: Ammon, Korihor, Pahoran, and Paanchi (CWHN 5:25-34). Jaredite names exhibit no consistently obvious linguistic affinity.

Scholars working on this project have connected Book of Mormon names to Hebrew, Aramaic, Egyptian, and other ancient Near Eastern languages.

A NUMBER OF BOOK OF MORMON WORDS OR NAMES APPEAR TO BE DEFINED IN THE TEXT:

ALPHA – part of title of Jesus Christ as “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” (3 Nephi 9:18).

BOUNTIFUL – Nephi 17:5, “the land which we called ‘Bountiful,’ because of its much fruit and wild honey”; and in 17:6, “we called the place ‘Bountiful,’ because of its much fruit.”